Stanza XXVIII. l. 867. Sped, undone, killed. Cp. Merchant of Venice, ii. 9. 70: 'So be gone: you are sped.' See also note on 'Lycidas' 122, Clarendon Press Milton, vol. i.
Stanza XXX. The two prominent features of this stanza are the sweet tenderness of the verses, and the illustration of the irony of events in the striking culmination of the hero's career.
l. 904. Cp. Pope, 'Moral Epistles,' II. 269:—
Woman's at best a contradiction still.'
l. 906. Cp. Byron's 'Sardanapalus,' I. ii. 511:—
Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing,
When men have shrunk from the ignoble care
Of watching the last hour of him who led them.'
Stanza XXXII. l. 972. See above, III, x.
l. 976. Metaphor from the sand-glass. Cp. Pericles, v. 2. 26—
'Now our sands are almost run.'
Stanza XXXIII. ll. 999–1004. Charlemagne's rear-guard under Roland was cut to pieces by heathen forces at Roncesvalles, a valley in Navarre, in 778. Roland might have summoned his uncle Charlemagne by blowing his magic horn, but this his valour prevented him from doing till too late. He was fatally wounded, and the 'Song of Roland,' telling of his worth and prowess, is one the best of the mediæval romances. Olivier was also a distinguished paladin, and the names of the two are immortalized in the proverb 'A Rowland for an Oliver.' Fontarabia is on the coast of Spain, about thirty miles from Roncesvalles. See Paradise Lost, I. 586, and note in Clarendon Press ed.
l. 1011. Our Caledonian pride, fitly and tenderly named 'the flowers of the forest.'
Stanza XXXIV. l. 1034. Cp. 'spearmen's, twilight wood,' 'Lady of the Lake,' VI. xvii.
l. 1035. Cp. Aytoun's 'Edinburgh after Flodden,' vii, where Randolph Murray tells of the 'riven banner':—
By your brothers and your children,
By the valiant and the strong.
One by one they fell around it,
As the archers laid them low,
Grimly dying, still unconquered,
With their faces to the foe.'
